[Phil Jones] Tom, I presume you meant Jan 18, 2005 ! In 1965 you would have been 25 – your heydey. Mine was when I was 28 in 1970 ! Some people do work beyond 65, but the examples I’ve heard of have only been doing teaching

[Wigley] Phil, Good news. You are correct, my 65th bithday is Jan. 18, 1965. I thought retired persons were allowed to be employed up to one-third time for the next 5 years?

(He’s not alone though; I’ve experienced complete brainfarts where I’ll type one thing and then type it again when I mean something different. Sometimes I type my password in where my username should be.)

How odd. What seems strange to me is not so much that he has failed at really basic arithmetic but that his memory of his earlier life is so messed up. The stuff that I was doing when I was eighteen was entirely different from the stuff that I was doing when I was twenty-eight, how would it be possible to get the two mixed up? Interestingly, while thinking about this, the one thing that really jumped out was pop music.

But maybe Jones can now use this as an excuse for all his junk science. He can suddenly discover that he has [insert politically correct term for someone who messes up numbers due to the stress of evil capitalism, bullying by right wingers as a child, or relentlessly increasing temperatures] and play the victim.

So we really shouldn’t criticize him, because it is all society’s fault.

Now how about you release an equivalent volume of your own e-mails for us all to root through? If you don’t want to, can you explain why not?

[REPLY: Because Anthony’s work is not publically funded and is not being used as the basis for a multi-trillion dollar re-ordering of the world economy. As for your logic…. this was filed under “humor”. -rep]

Leave the post up! If you can’t kick a man while he’s down, you don’t deserve to kick him. And seeing him kicked is too darned fun. We’ve all been kicked in the ‘nards and learned a lesson.at some point. This one is harmless fun, but fun none-the-less.

Isn’t “How old are you?” one of the standard questions asked when doing an evaluation for the onset of senile dementia? You have to give Wigley some credit though, he seems to be holding up quite well for a guy who was 104 years old.

Who cares? My back-of-envelope calcs sometimes gain or lose a zero on the end, and I’m a mathematician. But then, if they’re important at least I check them. This isn’t remotely important. Please, stick to the real issues.

I say these sorts of mistakes are important, but then I am a pedantic b@@tard. Scientists are supposed to be interested in accuracy. To me, the lack of accuracy in their written communications is a sign that their official work could suffer from a similar lack of attention to detail. These emails show they do not proofread for even the obvious mistakes before hitting the send button. You only need look at the IPCC reports, lauded by politicians worldwide for their accuracy, to see similar failures in fact checking.

At issue here is that PJ sent him the email to correct an error on the year and age, and then screws up his own. I know if I was going to point out the error, even nicely like he did, that I would not have a similar error in my reply. Too funny.

“Tom, I presume you meant Jan 18, 2005 ! In 1965 you would have been 25 – your heydey.”

A far most revealing Jonesian Slip – I think – appears later on in this email. With retirement on his mind and after outlining the various machinations for getting more tax-payers money in hand, Phil states: “So busy times the nest few weeks getting the best deal”.

We know that Professor Doctor Phil Jones mentions that he cannot use Excel to create a graph, and then calculate a trendline with the data.

Yet, the MSM ignored this issue.

Now, what is so important about this statement?

We know that Ponzi was found out when he asked a close associate of his how to transfer some cash to his family in Italy. This alerted people to the fact that this clever financier can’t even transfer money to relatives; yet, his scheme was based on foreign exchange differences.

Now I know that as a British subjects we accept the fact that our Prince Royal is challenged by the workings of a toothpaste tube, and that his butler is there to do it for him, yet we would expect that even Fred the Shred know how to use his own bank card and PIN number as head of a bank. In the same vein, what use is newspaper reporter that doesn’t know a simple task such as hacking a phone :)

Ponzi was found out when his ignorance of basic foreign exchange transactions came to light. We would have expected that in a normal environment, the fact that Phil Jones was shown to be a ten-thumbed idiot, his credentials as a serious scientists would have been questioned.

Well, the world is ready to spend trillions of dollars based in no small part on this man’s ability to do math and stats and to exercise his logical ability. Pointing out that the man has trouble with math and stats and arithmetic is probably fair game.

He s apparently in good company as so many of the people of a climatological bent seem to have trouble with these matters.

Question for Phil et al: You are known by the company you keep — so if you and your buddies can’t even perform simple arithmetical operations…how can you keep the world’s temperature records? It’s a fair question…

Alan Wilkinson,tib et al….the biggest mistake climate skeptics have been making is NOT taking the fight to the enemy. The AGW cultists kill us with every little error,the same should be reciprocated. And no. Doing so does NOT lower us to their level.That is just a saying for moral cowards. “Pleasing your enemies does not make them friends” (h/t SDA).

Here’s some hard fact expressed as math.
The rank of 2011 in weather related insurance pay out: #1.
The second place year, 2008
regardless of the cause it is time for all you smart guys to get to work on ways to feed us
cause things are going badly and fast

The more you look at him, the more Phil Jones seems the perfect example of the Peter Principle – someone promoted to his level of incompetence. But this says nothing in favor his Wigley, his predecessor, either.

In 3254.txt, Phil Jones wrote:
“Chris Vincent will be Dean from August, when Trevor takes on his new PVC post for
research here at UEA ! Chris seems much more honest than Trevor – hopefully not famous
last wrods.”

Here’s some hard fact expressed as math.
The rank of 2011 in weather related insurance pay out: #1.
The second place year, 2008
regardless of the cause it is time for all you smart guys to get to work on ways to feed us
cause things are going badly and fast

Speculation, speculation, speculation. Please, prove cause and effect – and in your own words, do it with math.

tom, you say you are expressing something as math, then give us two bytes of statistics resultants. Please, show your work. In real math you have to show your work. You can’t just pop a number down and get credit for it.

Can you tell me, mister mathematician, are these payouts adjusted for inflation? What stat method was used to compile the results? Did they consider if there were any facts that might assign some cause other than global warming?

The old record for tornadoes in a day, week, moth and year was, for all I believe, 1974 (which was a helluva month, right when Hank Aaron was going after Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record), right in the middle of the 1940-1975 negative curve on the temperature reconstructions. Were you out there before this year, telling everybody that cool trends cause tornadoes to proliferate?

With hurricanes since 2005 in a long lull and 2011 one of the “lulliest” years n record, what are we to think, about tornadoes being up and hurricanes down?

Do you think it might be more complex than one statistics resultant? or is everything one-cause-equals-one-and-only-one-effect?

Did you notice that Antarctic ice mass is growing and growing, even if the Arctic (which is much much less ice, overall) ice is not? Should we conclude that the South Pole ice is correlated with ONE year of really, really active tornadoes?

A one-off correlation means – well, really… nothing. One offs? Even 6 decades of tree-rings correlation with temperatures between 1880 and 1940 (the Golden Age of tree-rings?) can’t make the a long-recognized non-correleation for the last 70 years go away. And even if the correlation comes back, those 70 years of non-correlation (known as the “Divergence Problem”) will have to be explained. According to the trees, we are in a cold spell.

In complex systems like climate, everything is correlated with everything else. (That is what makes it a system.) Trying to point at ONE cherry-picked statistic and assigning it ONE cause out of the multitude – if you can pick out that one cause and be proven correct in the long haul, would you please pick my next Lotto numbers?

BTW: The global warming>tornado connection has already been found to be a wrong speculation.

@hum 2:07 pm:
“At issue here is that PJ sent him the email to correct an error on the year and age, and then screws up his own. I know if I was going to point out the error, even nicely like he did, that I would not have a similar error in my reply. Too funny.”

There is a term for this kind of mistake. Under Muphry’s Law, Wikipedia opens with

Not to be confused with Murphy’s law.

Muphry’s law is an adage that states that “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written“. The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy’s Law.

It is not being presented as science, just as a bit of fun at Phil Jones’ expense. I don’t see a problem.
Now that fact that this genius cannot handle basic XL, well, that might be a bit more revealing.

I have no idea how old I am. After 50 I stopped counting. Not for any reason. I LOVE birthdays. Mine especially. But it just doesn’t matter anymore how old I am. I can see me making this kind of mistake. Hell, I call my dogs my kids’ names and my kids my dogs’ names. I figure if I just say all of them, the correct name is in there somewhere.

Got nothing to do with humor – when trying to set yourself up as the best science blog you post this as a headline and come across just as petty and trite as those you heckle. There is a big difference between abject stupidity and obvious misstatements – not unlike your regular insistence that posters not hammer typos in each others posts (which I agree with).

If you ever want the moral high ground, this ain’t the way… just sayin.

What this exchange reveals is carelessness and lack of reality checking. As someone who is not a natural mathematician, I learned a long time ago to apply a reality test about orders of magnitude to any calculation I do, and to check and recheck before going into print (real or virtual).

It seems that the UEA team are not only barely literate, they are not real strong on basic arithmetic either. Could someone remind me what skill set these climate gurus have that entitles them to direct the world’s economy?

I have no idea how old I am. After 50 I stopped counting. Not for any reason. I LOVE birthdays. Mine especially. But it just doesn’t matter anymore how old I am. I can see me making this kind of mistake. Hell, I call my dogs my kids’ names and my kids my dogs’ names. I figure if I just say all of them, the correct name is in there somewhere.

Reminds me of the woman who had about 5 boys, all named the same. When she called, and they came, she just pointed at the one she wanted.

Maybe Phil Jones is too, maybe he just had a bad day, maybe his typing let him down, I dunno.

You know the most pathetic experience I ever had in business?

An MD/CEO refusing to contribute one iota to a major tender document, then making out that the document was third rate because there were two or three missed commas in a 60+ page document. Such an anally retentive, OCD dork, eh?

Brian H says: January 17, 2012 at 9:49 pm Reminds me of the woman who had about 5 boys, all named the same. When she called, and they came, she just pointed at the one she wanted.
……………….
The usual ending to this story is that when she wanted to call one child in particular, she used the child’s surname.

I have two things to say: The post does not, (no do i think it was intended to) imply Dr. Jones is simple minded. The post is funny and people ought to lighten up a bit. Let’s not pretend that we are above mocking someone for a stupid mistake when that someone is someone who badly needs to be taken down a peg.

Tom said….. “regardless of the cause it is time for all you smart guys to get to work on ways to feed us cause things are going badly and fast.”

I can teach you to fish Tom, then you can feed yourself.

As someone who’s done improv and stand up, I can tell you that this post is indeed funny and humorous because it displays the irony of the ‘Trust our math and give us more money’ crowd as being useless at math. Keep up the fine work Anthony. The trolls are pretending to be fellow deniers with their noses out of joint.